1. Technical Field
The invention relates generally to manufacturing control, and more particularly, to automated tool recipe verification and correction.
2. Background Art
Tool control in a manufacturing facility is important to maintain quality and efficiency. In many areas of manufacturing, tool control is achieved via computers which are in turn controlled by instructions commonly referred to as tool recipes. For example, in the semiconductor fabrication industry, various tools for processing product and/or measuring product are controlled by tool recipes. Each tool recipe may include thousands of parameters that instruct the tool on how to operate. In many cases, production tools can produce many different products by simply running a unique tool recipe, which gives the production tool flexibility. However, the use of tool recipes to achieve flexibility also creates a need to verify that the tool recipes used by the tools are written correctly. If the tool recipes are incorrect, products may be damaged or, in many cases, scrapped due to incorrect processing or measurement.
In one approach, a tool recipe is audited by comparing the tool recipe to a pre-determined reference recipe. U.S. Pat. No. 6,650,958 and U.S. patent application Publication No. 2004/0078107 disclose varieties of this approach. Shortcomings of this type of approach, however, include inapplicability to tool recipes that are downloaded from a recipe management system, and need for manual corrections to the tool recipes.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for a solution to verify tool recipes that does not suffer from the problems of the related art.